CHENNAI: The Centre has come up with a comprehensive plan to revamp and accelerate the growth of the fisheries sector in India through various schemes, including the recently launched ‘Pradhan Mantri Matsya Sampada Yojana (PMMSY). Explaining the proposed plans of the Union government, the Fisheries Secretary Rajeev Ranjan said the government targets scaling up the fisheries to help India achieve $ 5 trillion economy.
Citing the latest data, he claimed that India’s fisheries is on a trajectory of progress with an average annual growth rate of close to 11% in the last fiver years. “The growth rate of fish production of the country in the last five years is 7.53% while it is nearly 10% in exports”, he added.
He was speaking after inaugurating a digital conference on ‘emerging technologies in brackiswater aquaculture’ hosted by the Chennai-based ICAR-Central Institute of Brackishwater Aquaculture (CIBA). “The government is eying a total fish production of 220 lakh tonnes in the next five years. The latest estimates of the fish production during the period of 2019-20 in India is close to 15 million tonnes”, he said.
In a bid to boost the pace of initiatives to usher in the Blue Revolution, the government has unveiled a comprehensive plan which aim to address infrastructure modernisation, critical gap in value chain, post-harvest management, traceability and quality control under the PMMSY scheme, he said adding that the scheme was cleared by the union cabinet recently. “Under various schemes, the government is looking forward a total investment of 9 billion dollars in the next five years from the government sector,” he said.
Start-ups in aquaculture
The government would focus on developing entrepreneurial initiatives and promotion of start-up ecosystems in aquaculture, which has immense potential in India’s highly prospective brackish water resources, Ranjan added. For making this happen in a viable means, he suggested popularising adequate technologies in the farming. “Promoting start-ups in aquaculture by adopting the latest technologies in the field will help boost the production”, he said.
Aquaculture is one of the technology-driven sectors where technologies are adopted at a faster rate on a global scale. Ranjan sought the support of the CIBA in providing the required technological backstopping and handholding the start-ups to play an important role in taking forward the highly prospective sector of brackishwater aquaculture in the country, which is the fourth largest seafood exporter and the second largest producer in aquaculture. The latest statistics show that 28 million fishers and fish farmers in the country are directly dependent on fisheries at the primary level”, he said.
Doubling Exports
He further said that the union government is looking for doubling the exports of aquaculture production from India, which is the fourth largest seafood exporter and the second largest producer in aquaculture. “Presently, the country’s export from aquaculture production in terms of value is almost $ 7 billion of which the majority share comes from the shrimp export”, he added.
Species diversification
Stressing the need for improving the quality other than focusing on increasing quantity, Rajan opined that the government is in favour of producing diversified aquaculture species, especially indigenous shrimp varieties. He signalled shifting of the trend from single focus on vannamei to diversified shrimp species, including native species such as indicus, the Indian white shrimp, adding that the CIBA could take leadership in taking up a flagship programme enabling the commercial production of such shrimp varieties.
The conference was organised by the Institute Technology Management and Agricultural Business Incubator Unit of ICAR-CIBA. KK Vijayan, Director, ICAR-CIBA, who made introductory remarks, stressed the need of partnership between the governments, research institutions, private sector and the farming communities, on a P-P-P mode.